Ad-hoc interface standards have now emerged: it is no longer necessary to come up with new interfaces and task flows every time: standard web paradigms have emerged which can be and should be reused in new designs. For example: a product company website should have these standard navigation items: products, support, customers, about us, contact us.

As budgets tighten, clients no longer see a vast difference between larger web design shops such as Scient and Razorfish, 2-5 person firms, or even independent consultants, working from their homes with very low overhead and able to provide similar services at lower cost.

As big web shops have dissolved into breakaway smaller shops with same personnel, these breakaway shops have been able to take and complete business original shop could not complete profitably. In some cases, independent consultants can do same work at a much lower cost by pulling together an ad-hoc team of developers to work on a project by project basis.

What we are seeing is commoditization of web design experience.

The larger web design firms are seeing lot of competition from small 2-5 person shops, or independent contractors, working from their homes, with low overhead and/or off-shore resources, being able to compete on price, and stealing contracts from larger web design shops on that basis.

Large companies, facing budget cuts, are no longer interested in dealing only with name brand firms: A Fortune 500 such as Cisco is just as happy to deal with Brand X Design as they are with Razorfish, because when you put end-result designs side-by-side, they can’t see difference to justify cost. While there usually is small dissimilarity in quality and usability, to layperson, this difference does not present itself as enough of a value-add for added cost.

Small firms or independent web consultants are taking over space big boys used to play in and are doing it profitably. The moral of this story is: don’t be afraid of going for bigger clients: in this marketplace, even bigger companies are looking to small firms and other free agents: as long as you produce a professional design and have right skills: you can compete with big boys, and in this economy, win on price and still do great work, both for your clients and for your portfolio.

PAGE VIEWS: Every time someone views a page on your site, visit is also recorded in "page views". Example: One page with 4 pictures is equal to 1 page view.

UNIQUE URL'S: Every time someone views a page on your site, during a 24 hour period of time, page is logged as a unique URL. Example: One visitor viewing 1 page with 4 graphics would be counted at 5.

UNIQUE SITES: This is number of unique visitors to your site. Example: Each visitor to your site during a one month period is counted as "1" unique site, no matter how many times they visited your site.

Just to show you how numbers vary, below are some numbers from my site in September 2001.

Hit's: 77,158 Page Views: 10,855 Unique URL's: 548 Unique Sites: 5347